This invention relates to electronic mail and in particular to electronic mail on wide area networks, including between multiple incompatible electronic mail applications.
Electronic mail, or E-Mail is a means of sending electronic messages from one computer user to another. E-Mail has advantages of convenience, format, and storage for later retrieval not available with other forms of communication and has proved to be an important facilitator of interoffice communications.
The convenience and efficiency of E-Mail has placed E-Mail in widespread use but it has typically been limited to users located within a single company or organization and remains relatively underutilized between users located in different companies or organizations. Many barriers exist between the users in different organizations that prevent communication via this electronic medium. For example, users may be using different E-Mail systems having different protocols for addressing and formatting messages. Furthermore, even if similar E-Mail protocols were used, there also remains the very real problem of assigning each user a unique address and of developing some central piece of hardware and/or software that could route the messages from an address in one company to an address at another company.
All of the aforementioned obstacles have forced those wishing electronic mail interconnectivity between enterprises to develop and engineer their own piecemeal solutions. These users thus develop a system useful only for the specific interconnection desired and do not necessarily have add on capability to interface with users other than the specific user targeted. Interfacing with another enterprise requires that the process of engineering an interface begin again and much time and effort is wasted. In addition, the developer of this solution, typically an end user, does not have the system wide control or vantage point with which to effectively manage the interface or provide the software and system support. Thus, most organizations that might benefit from interenterprise communications find it too costly to set up and manage an interenterprise electronic communication capability or are led to believe that it is actually impossible to do so. In particular, smaller organizations, (10-100 people) often have no electronic mail system and resort to an inordinate amount of telephone and manual FAX communication to communicate with their correspondents.